Current medical imaging techniques produce digital images that are invaluable for diagnosis and treatment of patients. For example, current medical imaging techniques include X-ray and angiography, computed radiography (CR), computed tomography (CT), magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), positron emission tomography (PET), ultrasound, and so on. However, these images typically contain large amounts of data, thereby causing problems in storing and archiving them. In addition, the large image files generated from medical images must be transferred from one location to another, or between devices (such as between an imaging device and a computer for further processing).
In order to mitigate the problems associated with storing and transferring medical images, they are routinely compressed. However, existing compression techniques used to compress medical images are generic in that they are designed to handle any image and are not tailored to medical images. As such these techniques fail to take into account the special characteristics of medical images that could be exploited to achieve higher compression ratios.